Revision of Community_Supplied_Links from 2013, March 12 - 16:54

Useful Links Related to MINGW

Rather than wait for someone to migrate the community links from the old wiki. I'm starting from scratch and hoping any useful links that still work on the old wiki will eventually be added by the community.

As with the previous wiki page, please add links you think would be useful to the MinGW community. If you find errors or out-of-date links, please help fix them.

Libraries

Reference on STL This is a different version of STL than used by MinGW but the basics are the same.

Windows++ Source code from book on how to create your own Windows framework library.

Notes on gtk+: GTK+ is moving from version 2 to version 3. I found support for Windows development for gtk+ 3 not only lacking, but antagonistic to the Windows developer community. I also found them unwilling to correct issues that kept their libraries from compiling out of the box on Windows systems. While Tor Lillqvist has been great about supporting the Windows community with his Gtk+ 2 builds in the past, I believe things are changing with Gtk+ support. I highly recommend looking into other GUI libraries before considering development with Gtk+. I'm keeping these links for gtk+ here and up-to-date purely for reference purposes only.

Multimedia Libraries

ptex Disney's 3D modeling library (used in some of their movies) released under BSD license.

Open Source Flash Projects and libraries Projects ming, xml2swf, libswf build on mingw (though some need a few patches listed at Sourceforge under Forums (see Discussions sections)). Other projects may build as well.

Dirac/Schrodinger codecs Open and royalty free video compression and decompression software created by BBC research (part of the British Broadcasting Corp). Dirac is in C++ and Shrodinger (which aims for high performance) is in C.

General Libraries

SFL (Standard Function Library) is a portable function library for C/C++ programs. Provides a wide variety of functionality from string manipulation and searching to directory access to compression to socket and Internet programming and more.

Utilities

C++ Snippets There are also C Snippets. (The original site is down, but still accessible via archive.org.)

C Snippets Hosts some of the code from C Snippets plus some other C related snippets.

DrMingw Just in time debugging tool. Helps find where an error is in the source code when a program crashes. Check this wiki for more information on using it and for information on creating map files to use with it. There's also information on it in the Another MinGW FAQ reference listed below.

Pexports MinGW distribution's version of pexports. The pexports program can be useful when trying to link to dlls that were created by other compilers.

MinGW packages repository There's a copy of pexports under altbinutils-pe. The pexports program can be useful when trying to link to dlls that were created by other compilers.

Console 2 Command prompt replacement. May be used with cmd.exe or rxvt or other shells.

Plan 9 Utilities Ports for MinGW of utilities and libraries from Plan 9. Plan 9 includes an optimized mk program that can serve a similar purpose to GNU make when building programs plus other useful programs.

diffh Easy to read file difference tool. Works in conjunction with diff (available with msys). Outputs differences between two files side by side in HTML. Handles files with long lines very well.

lesspipe Enhancement for less in the msys environment. Lets you view all kinds of files not just text.

Searchmonkey Search tool with regular expression support similar to grep but providing a GUI interface. To build the most stable GTK version, use 0.8.1 source code available from the Downloads section under Compile from source. Newer QT version now available.

Quick User Interface Utilities

Dialog How To for building Dialog on OpenWatcom. It builds on MinGW with msys just as well. However, a few of the lines in the OpenWatcom patches for handling directory structures differently aren't needed. Dialog provides console GUI interaction for batch and shell scripts.

yad Yet another dialog, this is a fork of zenity with many added features. Uses GTK+ 2 to offer Windows look and feel for user interface objects and offers cross-platform use. Support for MinGW has been added to the source code.

zenity This provides a simple GUI interface for batch and shell scripts. It's been ported from POSIX systems to work with MinGW, msys and GTK+ 2. Similar to Dialog, but possibly less functions.

gxmessage Builds with MinGW and msys if GTK libraries are installed. Similar to Dialog but slightly different functionality.

Xdialog Builds with MinGW and msys if GTK libraries are installed. Dialog port using GTK instead of pdcurses. Use following configure options: ./configure --with-gtk2 --with-scanf-calls.

gtkdialog Has much more functionality than Dialog or Zenity. Compiles and builds fine with MinGW and msys. However, when run to produce a dialog through a script, it hangs, presumably due to threading issues on Windows. Tried adding -mwindows -mthreads to CFLAGS and -lpthread to the libraries, but worked the same. If someone comes up with a good work-around, this is a great tool for scripting and a nice way to provide a GUI for command line C/C++ programs.

LM BLD ui patches Patches to cross-platform portable browsers so that they can be used as user interfaces. Offers the ability to create user intefaces with basic HTML and CSS. Can work with UTF-8 files to support internationalization.

http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/ Traditional implementations of Unix utilities. May require porting to Windows, but could make a good base or reference for source code for some of these utilities.

Build Utilities

Several utilities related to building, installing and version control are available.

Build Utilities - Install

spkg Spkg is a package manager based on Slackware pkgtools. It's written in C so it's faster than the pkgtools scripts. It works on Windows or Linux providing a cross-platform solution to package management. Lets you keep track of, install and uninstall libraries and programs on your system. Also keeps track of versions of libraries installed and what files are installed so they can be easily uninstalled or updated with spkg. Works with standard tarball files (created with tar and gzip or bzip or lzma). You can set ROOT environment variable to point to your top level msys directory. Note: If you're using this with msys make sure your packages (tarballs) don't use any virtual directories under msys (such as /usr/bin) or edit your /etc/fstab file so that the actual physical directories can be seen and used within msys.

Programming Editors

SciTE Everyone has their favorite programming editor and this one's mine. It's highly configurable and functionality can be extended using LUA scripts. Here's a page with some configuration tips that might help get you started: SciTE Tips

VIM VI has been around for ages. VIM is VI improved. With new features such as tabs, this looks like it might be every bit as configurable as SciTE if not more configurable (but takes much longer to configure than SciTE). Gvim is the GUI version of VIM. There's also an older version CREAM at Sourceforge with a more Windows friendly user interface for Gvim. If you run across any good tips on configuring Vim or Gvim with MinGW, please post the links.

Tutorials

Programming Language Examples Alike Cookbook This looks like it could become a nice reference for C++ programmers and a good way to compare languages and find tips for converting between them. However, the C++ information is currently rather sparse. Maybe some MinGW C++ programmers can volunteer to help out this project.

Other Compilers

Tools from other Windows compilers can often be very useful with MinGW too.

Open Watcom Check out their interactive debugger and icon editor. Also check out their C/C++ and Win32 documentation.

lcc-win32 I haven't confirmed this, but it's rumored to have a graphical resource editor. This is a C only compiler (not C++), but resources are resources. Also, check out the C and Win32 documentation.

Cross-compilers

MinGW cross compiling environment The project builds a MinGW cross compiler and cross compiles many free libraries such as GD, SDL and Qt in static form. Runs on Linux systems.

Miscellaneous

HX Dos Extender The web site says its compatible with MinGW. The extender gives a way to run simple Win32 GUI apps in DOS.

KernelEx This is an Open Source project that creates a compatibility layer for Windows 98 and Windows ME machines that allows them to run programs specifically aimed only at later versions of Windows such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

More Information

Another MinGW FAQ The original MinGW FAQ revised and updated. Lists information the author of the FAQ found useful when working with MinGW.

Well, I got the page started, but now that it's up, I cannot seem to edit the original information to correct any of it. Am hoping whoever's maintaining this wiki will look into this issue and fix the Edit feature. Otherwise, there's no clean way to keep the information in the wiki pages up-to-date. Thanks.

The wiki does not allow me to fill in the title field. It automatically fills it in for me. However, when I go to save or preview, it loses this information and says Title field required. The changes will not save.

When I add a new reference, e.g. in HOWTO, then click on it in "preview" I used to be invited to create the new page; now all I see is a "page does not exist" message. I have to use the "Create content" menu to create the new page, which is much less convenient than the former behaviour.

FWIW, I don't seem to have a problem editing and saving existing pages, but I do already have the privilege to modify page titles.

I've found where the issue exists, I don't have a complete solution as yet. Laura, I've given you a special permission which allows you to update titles; I ask that you please refrain from doing so. This will allow you to edit the page. I will search for a solution to this problem.

Thanks for contacting me Laura. I've filed a bug report with Drupal. The form API within Drupal core is at fault. I've modified the one function that involves the title field to DTRT in a Q&D way so it now works for everyone.